Abstract

Anomalous dispersion of solute in porous media can be explained by the power-law distribution of waiting time of solute particles. In this paper, we simulate the diffusion of nonreactive tracer in dead-end pores to explore the waiting time distributions. The distributions of waiting time in different dead-end pores show similar power-law decline at early time and transit to an exponential decline in the end. The transition time between these two decline modes increases with the lengths of dead-end pores. It is well known that power-law distributions of waiting time may lead to anomalous (non-Fickian) dispersion. Therefore, anomalous dispersion is highly dependent on the sizes of immobile zones. According to the power-law decline, we can directly get the power index from the structure of dead-end pores, which can be used to judge the anomalous degree of solute transport in advance.